Wednesday 21 September 2011

Heat and Dust

Heat and Dust
by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

A relatively short novel, set in India and recounting two relationships that occur there, although the English relationship with India itself is a principal theme. A young woman visits India searching in part for details of her great Aunt Olivia who in the 1920s disgraced the family by having an affair with a local prince, the narrator also develops a relationship both with a local man and with the nation itself thus to an extent repeating history in the 1970s.  The novel won the Booker prize in 1975.  A quick read and reasonably diverting but for me largely disappointing, somehow I expected more, maybe I am missing something but I did expected more substance.

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